Michael Gove's Snowball Effect

Maguire, Kevin, New Statesman (1996)

A Gordonian gets in touch. The snout isn't a devoted follower of Gordon Brown but a near contemporary of Michael Gove who attended the private Robert Gordon's College (current fees: [pounds sterling]11,185) in Aberdeen. Now a senior academic at a renowned British university, my source recounts an incident from Mickey Gove's schooldays: "I was at the same school as Michael Gove, albeit several years below. As I'm sure is the case at every school, heavy snowfall was an occasion for much fun.

"At our school, things were very democratic--the first years, third years and fifth years would line up against the second years, fourth years and sixth years in a school-wide snowball fight." So far, so good ...

The Sunday Telegraph poacher-turned-Labour gamekeeper Patrick Hennessy's defection from the (cough) noble world of journalism to political spinning leaves, by the way, only one Old Etonian in Her Majesty's Press Gallery: the BBC's James Landale. The Sun's Tom Newton Dunn is widely cited, incorrectly, as an OE.

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Tom Neutron Bomb went not to Cameron's old school but Marlborough, the alma mater of Dave's wife, Samantha and the Middleton sisters. These things matter, especially when Downton Abbey is back on the box.

Let's return for a moment to Mickey Gove's schooldays: "As deputy head boy, Gove was tasked by the headmaster one morning with breaking up one such snowball fight. Accordingly, he strode from the prefects' office to the middle of the playground and announced to the 500 or so boys, in the pompous manner that we are all now accustomed to, that all snowball-throwing must immediately cease. …

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